And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors of the three-masted schooner, Mary Turner, smashed into kindling wood and sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the yarn of the sunken island.

No doubt inspired by Ernest Shackleton's legendary struggles (whose history hangs over this expedition with ghostly prescience), the scientists and filmmakers expect their three-masted schooner to be locked in place by pack ice throughout the Antarctic winter.

There were no cars, no trains, but there were three-masted ships sailing waters of incredible blue, the pyramids of Egypt off in the distance, the thriving world around Jerusalem, Mecca in all its glory, Rome when it had not yet crumbled.